U2 Drops the Bomb

Bono spins around on his heels to take in the dazzling night above and behind him: the illuminated cables of the Brooklyn Bridge, lacing the sky like golden thread; the lighted offices of the Manhattan skyscrapers across the East River, staring back at him like jeweled eyes. "Look at this!" the singer yells. "It's wild! What a sight!"

He swings back to face the U2 fans packed on the riverside grass of Empire-Fulton Ferry State Park for a free concert, the climax of a November 22nd video shoot in which the Irish quartet plays all day, all over Manhattan, on a flatbed truck. "When you've been doing this for years," Bono tells the crowd, "you remind yourself why you wanted to be in a band in the first place -- to come to the U.S., over the bridge into Manhattan for the first time. An amazing, powerful time."

Then he introduces "City of Blinding Lights," from U2's magnificent new album, How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb: "The chorus is set in New York," he says, "looking from Brooklyn." Guitarist the Edge fires up a steely barrage; bassist Adam Clayton and drummer Larry Mullen Jr. lock into a jubilant gallop. At the mike, in black leather and dark glasses, Bono again becomes the excited, twenty-year-old Dubliner, the former Paul Hewson, who first saw these lights in December 1980, on the way to U2's U.S. debut at the old Ritz on East Eleventh Street: "Neon heart, day-glo eyes/A city lit like fireflies/They're advertising in the skies/For people like us."

Then as the Edge builds a wall of chime under him, Bono achieves liftoff. "I'm getting ready," he sings with delight, "to leave the ground."

Later, in the encore, Bono, 44, shows what that feeling sounded like in the beginning by leading U2 into a thrilling version of their first single, a song he wrote in 1978, on his eighteenth birthday: "Out of Control."

The next morning, Bono is in his Manhattan apartment, sipping a Diet Coke to nurse a throat ravaged by the long-weekend campaign for Atomic Bomb: the free gig, the flatbed shoot, a three-song appearance on Saturday Night Live. The payoff will be huge. The album debuts at Number One in Billboard with first-week sales of more than 840,000 copies, the third-best figure of 2004 (after Usher and Norah Jones) and the year's best for a rock band.

Bono, Clayton, Mullen and the Edge (real name David Evans) took two years to record How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, with a small army of producers and mixers, including Chris Thomas, Steve Lillywhite and new Irish wunderkind Jacknife Lee. Now U2 are in high rock-combat gear: chewing up screens with a TV ad for the Apple iPod that doubles as a knockout video for the single "Vertigo"; compiling a "digital boxed set" (Bono's phrase) of U2's catalog for iTunes, to go with a personalized U2 iPod; revving up for a world tour to start in the U.S. in March. But today, in his high-rise living room, Bono is looking back at the start of his life with U2, recalling the incident that inspired his flood of memories in "City of Blinding Lights."